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If you are ready to begin your venture online, it’s important that you find a way to increase your online presence. One of the ways to do this is to set up your own website. When it comes to setting up your own websites, there are certain things to consider and one of these is web hosting. There are basically 4 main types of web hosting. They are different in terms of features and pricing.

Free Hosting

Free hosting is popular because it is free. With free hosting, you can set up your simple website with the tools provided by the hosting provider. You will have limited web space and bandwidth, and you can’t use your own domain name. Instead, the URL of your website will be something like MyUserName.ServiceProvider.com. Your hosting provider will most likely require you to display advertisements on your website, which will make them money.

Free hosting doesn’t give you much control over your website. Most of them don’t allow you to install software other than the ones they support. This option may be good for if you are on a really tight budget and you are making the website just for fun. If you have longer term plan for your online venture and want to build a more professional website, you may want to consider other hosting options.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is not free but it is very affordable. Due to its low cost, shared hosting is a very popular kind of web hosting for small websites. With shared hosting, you are sharing the server resources with other websites on the same server. Each shared hosting account has its own web space on the server that is separate from the others.
Shared hosting packages usually come with a web-based control panel system. For example, the shared hosting packages at BlueHost comes with the cPanel. This control panel allows users to configure their websites easily, e.g. installing scripts such as WordPress, with just one click of a button. Some of these shared hosting packages also allow you to host multiple websites, each has its own domain name, with one hosting account.

The downside of shared hosting is, well, you have to share the server resources with other websites. If one of the websites one the server is very resource-intensive, then the performance of your website will be affected adversely.

Virtual Private Server Hosting

A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual server. The virtualization of a physical server allows all its virtual servers to share its system resources, such as CPU, hard drive and memory. So how is VPS hosting different from shared hosting?

With virtual private server hosting, you have your own “server” with its own operating system that can be rebooted without affecting other virtual servers on the same physical server. In addition, virtual private server hosting offers a minimum allocation of system resources. Therefore, unlike shared hosting where the performance of your website can be dragged down by other resources-intensive websites on the same server, your website on a VPS has guaranteed resources. With VPS hosting, you have more control over the environment than shared hosting, without having to pay for the cost of a fully dedicated server.

Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicated server hosting gives you full control of your hosting environment. You have the physical server all to yourself. This hosting solution is recommended for high traffic websites that require high level of reliability. If you have very specific need with regards to your hosting environment such as running specific software, this may also be your option. Dedicated hosting is much more expensive than the other hosting options.